Italy: Prince of the piazza

Prince Giorgio I of Seborga is densely bearded and 63 years old, a man of tense erudition with a relentless smoking habit. He is hitting his stride in the Palazzo del Governo. "Seborga has existed for 1,000 years, Italy for a mere 130," he cries. "It is not Italy that should recognise Seborga, but vice versa." This, I think, needs some explaining.

Seborga is a pretty Italian Riviera village and, in most respects, similar to others overlooking the Mediterranean. Its ancient hilltop centre is a tight-packed tangle of tiny streets. Terraces stride down the slopes, bearing the flowers that keep the local economy alive.

The place has, however, one significant particularity: it claims to be a sovereign state, entirely independent of Italy - which it considers a foreign country. The scattered commune of 2,000 souls declares itself a principality, entertaining diplomatic relations with other states and issuing its own coins and stamps. The claims are rooted in the twists of northern Italian history and expressed in the person of Giorgio I, its "sovereign prince".

Naturally, Italian officialdom disagrees. After years of apparently trying to ignore the troublesome village, it has taken the "principality" to court in a complex case to be decided, finally, next month. This will effectively tackle Seborga's assertion of sovereignty - whence the prince's opening agitation. The matter is, he says, not dependent on the judicial decisions of a younger foreign power (ie Italy), any more than British sovereignty is dependent on, say, Belgian court deliberations. "Quite," I reply, the head spinning lightly.

This is more serious than I had expected. A sign on the sinuous access road welcomes you to the "Principato di Seborga". Flags in the blue and white "national" colours festoon the streets. Weighty questions of historical and judicial truth are apparently at issue.

Born into a well-established family of market gardeners, Giorgio Carbone was elected prince - in line with tradition - in 1963. This ended his medical career. Duty to Seborga prevailed and took precedence over his desire to marry. He remains, regretfully, a bachelor.

For the past 36 years, he has dedicated himself to a principality of five square miles that counts 374 citizens (not all residents qualify as citizens), a bar, a bank, two restaurants and a brace of shops.

It also includes the palace - which resembles a rural town hall - where we now find ourselves. Dressed in a dark-blue suit, the prince could indeed be the local doctor - roughly the level of respect he evokes later in the bar - except for the chain-smoking and the bags under his eyes. For Giorgio, substantiating Seborga's historical sovereignty is a crusade that regularly keeps him up all night studying documents. He sits me down to explain the principality's case.

Two hours later, we have careered across the centuries and met a cast of thousands, including Romans, Celts, Ligurians, St James, Mary Magdalene, Caesar, numerous popes and Holy Roman Emperors, Cathars, Cistercians, St Bernard, Knights Templar, Peter the Hermit and Vittorio Amadeo II, King of Sardinia. All apparently have a bearing on Seborga's right to independence, although through the thick fog of documents and intense monologue only the headlines register.

From the 10th century, it seems, the then much bigger Seborga was run by monks. In the 12th century, it became the first and only sovereign Cistercian state in history - and an independent principality of the Holy Roman Empire.

F or the next 500 years, the monks elected their abbot, who, by the same token, became prince - thus setting the precedent for the present Giorgio, who also claims spiritual and temporal leadership. In 1729, the principality was sold to the King of Sardinia and the title of sovereign prince disappeared.

But, and this is the key, Seborgans claim the sale was invalid. Thus, when Sardinia entered the kingdom of Italy in 1861, Seborga retained de jure independence - as it did at the 1946 establishment of the Italian republic. The Italian republic may be present in the village - there is a mayor, town council and proper town hall up the street - but it is to their prince that Seborgans look for real leadership, Giorgio says.

That is why they voted to resurrect the role in 1963. "In the post-war years, people were lost. We needed to reassert who we were," he says. As scion of Seborga's most respected family and already steeped in the principality's past, he was the natural choice.

"The Italian government say we did it for tourism. The government are imbeciles! Tourists? Pshaw!" The prince has a lively line in invective and, apparently, truth on his side. Apart from one tiny souvenir shop, Seborga is notably light on tourism paraphernalia. It has, for instance, no hotel.

By now, I am beginning to lose my grip. The principality is, after all, barely a blip on the radar. The few folk walking around it - shopkeepers, schoolchildren - look like ordinary Italian villagers leading ordinary village lives. So I turn to one of them, a young Seborgan secretary. "The prince?" she says, with no trace of irony. "We look on him as a father, a brother, a friend, a sovereign. We turn to him for advice and guidance." About what? "About anything." Ah.

Seborga has consuls in many Italian towns and villages, and also farther afield. Foreign delegations are apparently always showing up. Why?

"As a sovereign nation, we have a perfect right to have relations in other countries," says the prince, tartly.

At home, he is flanked by 15 ministers who share practical duties with the town council, a task made easier by the fact that most of the ministers are also councillors. Relations between prince and town hall are friendly, the mayor tells me. "This is a small village and we do different jobs," he says, although he refuses to comment on the sovereignty issue.

The prince apparently perches somewhere above, setting, among other things, an example. As we walk through the streets, he starts picking up litter and the few other people abroad immediately start picking up litter, too. The prince tut-tuts and they smile shamefacedly. I cannot help feeling, however, that litter, guidance and a duff 18th-century property deal do not get to the bottom of the Seborga affair. The gravity with which the prince takes his pinprick principality demands that there be more. This emerges over dinner with some of the prince's closest friends. "There's another dimension to Seborga's sovereignty," says Giorgio Pistone, a former maths professor, writer of legal textbooks and apparently the opposite of a loose-headed fantasist.

H e runs through a catalogue of surprising phenomena: the 16th-century plague that killed thousands in the vicinity, but no one in Seborga, a 19th-century earthquake that did much the same, and the fact that, although the next-door village has been invaded 11 times in the past 1,000 years, Seborga has remained inviolate.

The village also has a weird gravitational anomaly, which, according to Pistone, has fascinated American and Russian scientists. Pistone says that there are 600 such mysteries connected with Seborga.

What is the explanation? Oh dear - these are deep waters. There exists, it seems, nothing less than a Big Seborga Secret that no one has ever pierced, but which will reveal all. "Many have got near, then stopped," says Pistone, darkly. The implication is that it is a very big secret indeed, relating to matters of enormous spiritual and historical importance. Otherwise, asks the prince, why would generations of popes and hundreds of papal bulls all have supported Seborga "even when we were wrong"? Why are relevant documents inaccessible?

So this is it. Seborga is the seat of something ill-defined, but extraordinary. "It is a sacred place," says Pistone - and the prince is its present guardian. No wonder he treats the issue of Italian recognition as mundane. No wonder he looks rather more jiggered than the affairs of a 374-strong state seem to warrant.

And thank heavens he now changes tone to tell a risqué story about the she-wolf of Rome - although the switch, this time from manifest destiny to bar-room earthiness, is as disorienting as anything that has gone before. Both modes seem quite natural to him.

An Italian official I talk to dismisses the prince as "a crank". Giorgio I has heard it, and worse, before. "I am sure that no one can hurt me. People have tried and suffered bad consequences," he says as, late into the night, we part. Consequences such as? "Serious illness. Strange and sad, but it happens." And then he has changed tack again, discoursing on Seborga's temperate climate, so ideal for commercial flower-growing. A crank? If only it were that simple.